Robert Frost: Darkness or Light?

Fifty years ago today, the poet Robert Lee Frost died, at the age of eighty-eight. Though Frost is thought of as a contemplative New England poet, he was born in San Francisco, and named for the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. As Raymond Holden explained in his 1931 New YorkerProfile of Frost, Frost’s father, William, was “an ardent Democrat and States’ Rights man.” Father Frost had tried to enlist in the Civil War on the Southern side, but was rejected because he was too young. “By the time Robert was born,” Holden writes, “the elder Frost was booming around San Francisco in a top hat, whooping up everything that was Democratic and belittling everything that wasn’t.” The young Robert Lee Frost grew up in politics; William Frost wrote for the San Francisco Bulletin, where a political enemy once took a shot at him through the window. “Around election time, the boy’s father used to dress him up in fancy costume and make him ride on floats in political parades or pound along in some torchlight procession getting sparks in his hair. Once when Father Frost was running for the office of something like tax-collector, Robert tagged around after him into all the saloons, helping to tack up election placards.”

It’s hard to imagine the author of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”—the watcher of trees and grass, of frozen lakes and forested darkness—pinning up political posters in a crowded San Francisco bar. But, while the personality that comes through in Frost’s poems was a genuine one, it was also edited. Frost the poet seems like a quiet person, a loner. But, Holden reports, Frost the man would often “sit up late and talk, eating apples, gossiping about everyone and everything, a little maliciously sometimes but always brilliantly and soundly.” Frost liked long walks in the mountains, but he also liked “sea chanteys, sports, the theatre.” He liked “to talk and read about scientific achievements and exploration.” (In “A Visit to Camelot,” her wildly entertaining memoir of a White House dinner she attended in 1962, for that year’s Nobel laureates, Diana Trilling writes, “Out of the corner of my eye I had spotted Colonel John Glenn. He was talking to, of all people, Robert Frost, and there must have been six people huddled around them, trying to hear what they were saying.”)

There was, Holden writes, a “strength and vividness” to Frost in person, which you would be unaware of if you only knew his poems, as they lacked “the very quality which makes him most noticeable as a personality. It is as if that quality were kept out—frequently, but certainly not always—by some strangely generated sense of reserve.” In his poetry, Frost emphasized the part of himself that remained aloof and on the outside. He was like “a very keen-witted boy,” Holden says, “who would rather know how to sharpen an axehead than sharpen it, who would rather know where spruce gum comes from than go and gather it.” Active with one part of himself—playing baseball, clearing brush, trudging through the woods looking for wildflowers—he was also always watching and weighing. He was talking with you but he was also attending to the patterns of your speech, listening for a poetic rhythm.

While Holden seems to have thought of Frost as an essentially cheerful person who from time to time stepped away from that cheerfulness for the purposes of composing poetry, Joseph Brodsky came to the opposite conclusion. That reserve, he argued, actually represented the real Frost. The rest was just window dressing.

Frost, Brodsky writes, in “On Grief and Reason,” his 1994 essay for The New Yorker, “is generally regarded as the poet of the countryside, of rural settings—as a folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer, generally of positive disposition.” He “greatly enhanced this notion by projecting precisely this image of himself in numerous public appearance and interviews”—like Holden’s, one imagines. In reality, Brodsky writes, Frost was a dark, “terrifying” poet, as Lionel Trilling had called him. He was a poet animated by “anticipation,” by a knowledge of “what he is capable of,” by a sense “of his own negative potential.” Frost’s life contained much besides contemplative strolls through the New England countryside, but Brodsky argued that in that countryside, Frost had seen the most profound part of himself. In nature, Frost had painted his “terrifying self-portrait.”

Look again, Brodsky suggests, at “Come In”—the title poem to a collection that was printed in a special Armed Services Edition for U.S. soldiers. In the poem, a man approaches the edge of the woods. He can hear, somewhere in the trees, the singing of a thrush, but the woods are shadowed, the bird is hidden:

Too dark in the woods for a birdBy sleight of wingTo better its perch for the night,Though it could still sing.

“Far in the pillared dark,” the poem continues, “Thrush music went— / Almost like a call to come in / To the dark and lament.” But the poet, who is “out for stars,” refuses. “I would not come in,” he says,

I meant not even if asked,and I hadn’t been.

It sounds like an affirming, resolute poem: walking in the woods, he feels a shiver, then walks on. But don’t believe those final lines, Brodsky tells us, with their “jocular vehemence.” Don’t be deceived by the idea that the poet is “out for stars,” and that he can turn so easily away from those woods. That’s Frost’s usual poetic sleight of hand—his usual front of “positive sensibility.” “If he was indeed ‘out for stars,’ ” Brodsky asks, “why didn’t he mention that before?” Almost certainly, he’s standing at the edge of the woods in the first place because part of him wants to be there—to “make a meal” of his own “dreadful apprehension.” The poet has invited himself, in short, to the edge of the woods, and, once there, he is trying to quell his own impulses; he is “shielding himself from his own insights.” “The twenty lines of the poem,” Brodsky concludes, “constitute the title’s translation. And in this translation, I am afraid, the expression ‘come in’ means ‘die.’”

Personally, I love Brodsky’s reading of Frost. Frost, he thought, wanted to explore the tension, or the connection, between “grief and reason”—the grief of the thrush in the woods, and the reason of the poet stepping back from them. Grief and reason, he writes, are

language’s most efficient fuel—or, if you will, poetry’s indelible ink. Frost’s reliance on them… almost gives you the sense that his dipping into this inkpot had to do with the hope of reducing the level of its contents; you detect a sort of vested interest on his part. Yet the more one dips into it, the more it brims with this black essence of existence, and the more one’s mind, like one’s fingers, gets soiled by this liquid. For the more there is of grief, the more there is of reason.

This captures perfectly what so many of us love about Frost: his delicious indecision; his reluctant normalcy; his dark energy. His most famous lines may well be “The woods are lovely, dark and deep. / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” Some of death’s terrifying force, his poetry suggests, might be borrowed, and used, for the purposes of life.

Photograph: Library of Congress.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.

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